Recess: not just fun and games

By Patty Mattern

From M, winter 2006

One expects a 9-year-old to rise up in protest when the school
principal does away with recess, but a 56-year-old man? Trends to
cut recess times or eliminate recess altogether frustrate
University of Minnesota researcher Anthony Pellegrini. While some
people view recess as trivial and unnecessary, such breaks foster
children's development, says Pellegrini in his new book,
Recess: Its Role in Education and Development. Pellegrini,
an educational psychology professor, has spent 25 years on school
playgrounds studying children's behavior and the impact of recess
on different aspects of adjustment to school. His research shows
that recess maximizes students' attention to classroom tasks and
also helps them learn how to interact with each other socially.
Still, an increasing number of schools are eliminating recess, to
the detriment of children's development; Pellegrini hopes his
research helps stop this trend. Many school administrators seem
oblivious to the research. "I get more and more calls from
distraught parents in the United States, Canada, and the UK. They
are frantic because schools are eliminating recess," Pellegrini
said.

Through his research Pellegrini has found that
recess is an easy mark for elimination because children don't have
as much power to advocate on their own behalf. "Frankly, kids are
easy targets because schools can take something away from them and
they can't make their voices heard," Pellegrini says.

Some school leaders are cutting recess, saying it is a waste of
time--valuable time that could be used for instruction and
improving student achievement. "That is so contrary to theory and
data. There's no research or theory to suggest that getting rid of
recess is good for student achievement," Pellegrini says. "If they
say they have evidence that it improves achievement, ask to see it
or where it has been published." School superintendents and school
boards are also making decisions to cut recess for political
reasons, Pellegrini says. "If you look at the way school
superintendents operate, those positions are political jobs," he
says. "For them, it's good political fodder to get rid of recess
because they think it shows that 'We mean business.'" Decisions
relating to schools should be based on the research and knowledge
of people who know schools, Pellegrini adds, not because it makes
for good political sound bites. Recess can be a nuisance for
administrators because of possible lawsuits related to playground
injuries and because teachers don't like it--they don't like doing
recess duty, he says. Administrators and teachers who view recess
this way fail to see that recess time is its own classroom,
Pellegrini says. "The way young people learn to interact with peers
is by interacting with their peers and the only place this is
allowed to happen in schools is at recess," he said. "They don't
learn social skills being taught lessons in class." If adults step
back and think about the recess issue, most realize that everyone
needs breaks to do well at work, Pellegrini says. In fact, all
kinds of animals do better at tasks if a large task is broken down
into parts with breaks. These breaks distribute the effort of
learning across the tasks, rather than massing it into one session,
he says. For example, researchers in one study gave tasks to a
variety of research subjects, including pigeons, young children,
and senior citizens. In all cases, the subjects learned better with
breaks throughout the task. "Breaking it up maximizes learning,"
Pellegrini says. "Students are more attentive after recess than
before recess." Another reason school administrators give for
cutting recess revolves around bullying. In fact, just this week, a
middle school principal in China, Maine, cut recess for seventh-
and eighth-graders in an effort to stop bullying. Cutting recess is
not the answer, according to Pellegrini. "Bullying occurs when the
playground is not well supervised and research shows that less than
two percent of the total behavior on the playground is aggression,"
Pellegrini says. Through his research Pellegrini has found that
recess is an easy mark for elimination because children don't have
as much power to advocate on their own behalf. "Frankly, kids are
easy targets because schools can take something away from them and
they can't make their voices heard," Pellegrini says. Parents
wanting to save recess can turn to Pellegrini's book, written for
all audiences, not just educational practitioners. While the book
is reader friendly, Pellegrini's research is detailed in the
appendix, so that it also meets the needs of practitioners, he
said. Pellegrini suggests that parents need to speak up in order to
save recess. "Parents need to hold their school superintendents and
school boards accountable," he says. "If school leaders want to
eliminate recess, ask them to show the data that supports such a
decision."